Infrastructure Train Kept Chugging In Challenging Year

Granite prices were soaring. Same with asphalt and concrete.

The Great Peanut, alas, would have to wait.

New Haven was supposed to begin construction earlier this year on the peanut — a new squooshed roundabout with a novel design at the treacherous intersection of Chapel Street and Yale Avenue near the Westville Music Bowl and Yale Bowl. (Read a story about the project here.)

Those soaring prices delayed it. A local contractor had won the bid for the project. But those high prices meant he could no longer afford to do the job.

“We understood. We’re not here to put someone into bankruptcy. We can’t force someone to do it,” said City Engineer Giovanni Zinn.

So New Haven had to delay the projects for months. It had to negotiate a new contract with a new company, finalize plans and approvals.

And it did. As 2022’s end neared, a construction crew did appear at the intersection. Work got underway on the latest effort to make New Haven’s streets safer and save lives.

Now multiply that incident thirtyfold — and you get a sense of the many ​“infrastructure” projects Zinn’s team keeps on top of at any one time and hustles each day to keep on track amid customary bureaucratic approval delays along with unexpected obstacles like soaring inflation and supply chain breakdowns.

Those latter factors were the story of the year in infrastructure, worldwide. Projects were shelved or sidelined because of the fallout from the Russia-Ukraine War, Covid-spawned shipping and productions bottlenecks, and double-digit inflation. HVAC parts and fire alarm strobes once available at local stores now require a 12 to 18-week ordering wait; electrical parts that used to come within 12 weeks can be delayed as long as a year.

The Great Peanut also reflected the flip side of that 2022 coin: Infrastructure upgrades proceeded throughout town despite those obstacles.

Zinn offered an annual infrastructure update Tuesday during a visit to WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

City-hired crews repaired some 200 isolated broken sidewalks along with about a dozen longer stretches of sidewalk, boosting local minority-owned business in the process.

It transformed three underused, rundown park structures into new neighborhood youth and community centers, with three more in the short-term works and two-others longer term. (Read about that here.)

Long-awaited upgraded tennis courts reopened in Edgewood Park along with new pickleball nets.

The rebuilt Grand Avenue Bridge reopened, along with three new pedestrian bridges in the woods of West Rock.

After years of delays, most of the Edgewood-to-Downtown cycletrack opened. The eastern portion remains unfinished because of those supply chains: The city’s waiting on a traffic signal controller because a manufacturer is months behind on orders. Zinn worked around the supply disruption to open the first portion by finding unused poles in the city storage to replace ordered ones that were unavailable.

Zinn said the city also learned a lesson from that project: Drivers get confused when you use planters to separate bike lanes from traffic lines. The planters near Edgewood School have been repeatedly toppled. ​“I don’t think we’re going to see planters citywide” at other ​“safe-streets” cycletracks. Raised bike/pedestrian lanes seem to have worked better: ​“Drivers understand the area above the curb is not theirs. It’s easier for people to parse.”

Looking ahead to 2023, Zinn expects the city to repair structural problems with the Humphrey Street bridge and begin a years-long process for larger repairs to the Ferry Street bridge including replacing the deck and addressing corrosion that had been painted over in a previous renovation. Actual work should begin on state-funded projects to make major corridors safer (from Valley Street to Quinnipiac Avenue) now that the city is completing a required preliminary ​“coring” sample process to determine what’s under the road. The city’s first electric trash truck is expected to arrive. That peanut should be completed early in the year. And look for new ​“safe streets” fixes along with sports upgrades at Rice and Blake Fields.

Also look for the public to keep demanding better infrastructure. It has become a hot topic in New Haven.

“There’s an understanding that infrastructure is about connection,” Zinn reflected. ​“The point of infrastructure is not to have a nice sidewalk or a nice bridge or a nice street just for the sake of that,” but also to ​“connect people to each other, to opportunity, to recreation.”

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Giovanni Zinn on ​“Dateline New Haven.”

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